Current character entry devices, such as keyboards, are primarily used for data entry and are specifically designed for specific languages. For example, a U.S. English keyboard lacks numerous diacritics that are necessary to correctly type non-English languages. In the increasingly global marketplace, the capability to type in numerous languages with typist ease is a practical issue.
A conventional approach to providing diacritics essential to a language is to utilize “national keyboards” that generate language specific accented characters. Typically, commonly used diacritical characters are assigned a unique key on the keyboard. Thus, for example, it is common to find the diacritical character “ñ” on a Spanish keyboard but not on a French keyboard since the “tilde” is not used in the French language. Similarly, the diacritical characters “à”, “é” and “ù” are found on most French keyboards but not on Spanish keyboards while the diacritical characters “ä”, “ö” and “ü” are found on German keyboards. However, each keyboard is designed primarily for one language. Persons who write in more than one language are required to both switch keyboards and use a different keyboard driver application tailored to the desired language, or improvise to generate the desired diacritic. One problem arising from the use of national keyboards is that even though two keyboards may contain the same characters, their positions may be quite different. Thus, the position of the “acute” and “grave” accents on a keyboard designed for France is different from that of a keyboard design for Italy. Switching keyboards requires the user to remember different keyboard layouts, a complication that potentially slows typing by the user. Further, switching keyboards requires additional keyboard driver applications as the placement of characters on the keyboard is different. Additionally, it can be challenging for multilingual users to remain proficient in entering text in different languages when having to use keyboards with different key layouts. A further complication arises when using portable equipment, in that it may be inconvenient or impossible to change the physical keyboard in portable equipment. Under such conditions, the user may have to resort to using only a mental image of a language specific keyboard layout.
Another approach includes the use of “dead keys” to obviate the need for backspacing while entering accented characters that are not assigned a unique key. It will be appreciated that the keyboard would be much too large if every possible accented character were assigned a unique key. With a dead key, the operator initially selects the dead key appropriate to the required diacritic and then selects the appropriate character key to produce a diacritical character. This dead key enters the accent but does not advance the display. Reference is made to U.S. Pat. No. 4,204,089. Only a few characters can be assigned to the dead keys, while over twenty-five different diacritical modifiers are required for European languages. In addition, some European characters use diacritics that are not modifications of existing characters but unique characters on their own. Consequently, these diacritical characters do not translate well to a “dead key” approach.
Another conventional approach to generating diacritics is to use a “compose” key, which is a key designated by the user. Pressing the compose key and then a sequence of keys causes a keyboard driver application to interpret the sequence of two or three characters as a composition: i.e., <compose>+{grave over ( )}+a=à. However, the user is required to remember many different combinations to produce the desired diacritical character, slowing the keyboard entry speed of the user.
Yet another conventional approach utilizes a repetition method. A user repeatedly presses a key to cycle through possible diacritics for the desired diacritical character. For example, one press of the letter “a” yields “a”. A second press of the letter “a” yields “à”. A third press of the letter “a” yields “á”. A fourth press of the letter “a” yields “ä”, etc. (Reference is made to U.S. Pat. No. 6,340,937.) However, the user is required to either remember where in the cycle the desired character is produced or focus on the keyboard and screen when cycling through the possible characters. This approach also slows keyboard entry speed of the user and decreases efficiency.
Therefore there is a need for a method to provide for the manipulation of an inputted character string to a diacritic-modified character string using a single layout for a character entry device.
This background information is provided to reveal information believed by the applicant to be of possible relevance to the present invention. No admission is necessarily intended, nor should be construed, that any of the preceding information constitutes prior art against the present invention.